So Come Up To The Lab

Completely OT: During the summer of 1973, one of the designers for the theater where we were working brought in the London cast album of "The Rocky Horror Show," and we played it incessantly backstage. Wore. It Out. The next summer, the show itself was brought from London to the Roxy in Hollywood, and a bunch of us got tickets and headed forth to see it. We were shocked to find that most of the audience was suburbanites from Van Nuys and such -- we knew because of all the white belts, polyester shirts and pant suits, and the many station wagons being valet parked. But the show was amazing. Tim Curry was amazing. The whole cast was amazing. We cheered and whooped and carried on as if we'd seen some sort of miracle. Frankenfurter's entrance, though similar to that in the movie -- in that it involved an elevator and platform heels (and Tim Curry in a cape)  was a complete show stopper. The place went wild. And recall, the Roxy was -- and is -- quite a small facility, set up like a supper club, not a theater. The show took place all around and within the audience. It was extraordinary.

"So come up to the lab
See what's on the slab...."
------------------------------------
So today (actually, yesterday, now, as I was diverted by other things before I could finish this post) was our day to hie ourselves up to Los Alamos. We didn't go to the lab as it were -- I wasn't even sure where the labs were until after I checked the map again when we got home. The labs are on a ridge across a ravine south of the town. There's one way in, and you have to have a pass.

I'm sure it's grand. The folks we know who are connected with the place are... well, unique, let's put it that way.

We would not have made it at all if I hadn't taken the Red Van in for a major service call the day before. We knew something was wrong when we could barely get up Sedillo Hill on the way back from Albuquerque on Thursday. I thought it might be the dust clogging the air filter, but no, it was time for a tune up, and time to stanch some of the leaks, too...

At any rate, while I was waiting outside the shop for the repairs to be finished and signed off, I was watching the sky in the north and east. There were storm clouds gathering, lighting flashing, but it was still quite warm, and the air was strangely still. Despite all the lightning, there was no thunder, which I took as a sign that there wouldn't be any rain either. Then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a brownish cloud moving in from the northwest. It looked fairly small at first, but it grew and grew, seemingly moving from west to east, but later I would learn it was actually moving in from the north and west, and I was seeing its looming height as it got closer.

It was a haboob. The first one I've ever seen or experienced.

I don't recommend it.

The dust cloud kept growing in height as it moved south toward the shop.  Drew, the man working on the van, said he was going to drive it around the block to make sure everything was good, and I watched him turn onto the street as the dust cloud reached it. The wind picked up strongly, whistling through the portal under which I stood. The dust and grit in the air felt like sandpaper as it hit my face, and I turned away. The sky turned brown, and then it seemed like we were enveloped in a brown fog. I'd say visibility dropped to no more than 25 feet.

The wind was howling, but we were completely wrapped in brown fog. It was an image right out of the Dust Bowl of the '30s.

After a while, the air seemed to clear a bit, and I saw the Red Van coming back. Drew acted like nothing had happened as he an an assistant checked a few more things under the hood before handing me the key and sending me on my way. I drove maybe half a mile to the east, to the post office to pick up my mail, and as I did, the brown fog enveloped everything again, and the wind was blowing so hard that limbs were breaking off trees and flying through the murky air and landing in the street. Great. I couldn't see more than twenty feet or so ahead, and limbs were crashing in the streets. Needless to say, I proceeded at a crawl.

When I got to the post office, another car pulled up, and the woman driving just sat there. I went in the post office, turning away from the wind and the dust and holding on to my hat, just as another man went in the other door. He said to me, "LOVELY weather we're having, isn't it?" I said, "Couldn't get much worse." "Just wait," he said.

He was right. By the time I got the mail and headed back out to the Van, I could barely find it. I had to keep my head down, which made things difficult, but the combination of the wind and the dust made visibility practically zero, something like a white-out -- only it was brown and the air was warm and the grit cut like little razors.

I sat in the Van for a few minutes while I waited for the air to clear enough to at least see whether I was backing into another car or not.

It didn't take too long. But by the time I got back on the street, the brown fog was back, and the other drivers and I drove no faster than if we had been caught in a winter ice fog (which I have been, as I'm sure most other drivers around here have been.) Finally, when I got close to home, the air started clearing and the wind started dying down. I could smell the pungent aroma of the dust through the a/c vents in the Van. By the time I turned into our driveway, there were even a few rain drops and almost no sign of the dust cloud any more.

The whole episode had lasted perhaps fifteen minutes. It was not pleasant at all.

Old timers say they haven't seen anything like it since the '50's -- or maybe even the '30's.

Later, I talked to a friend who lives on a spread about three or four miles north, and she said she'd heard the wind, but didn't see the dust cloud. She said the wind was so loud she thought someone was outside rolling her garbage can around. When I described the dust cloud, she couldn't believe it. A haboob. Like they have in Phoenix. She's lived in this area off and on for about 20 years, and she'd never seen anything of that magnitude. Mostly, she said, she's seen dust devils, some of them quite large resembling tornadoes, but never a huge wall cloud like I described.

The dust cloud came in from the north west, feeding on the drought-parched open fields, some of which have been plowed recently but not planted. Some of the local farmers have planted several times, only to dig up the stunted crops due to lack of rain. We may have had a wild time with the dust cloud the other day, but the amount of rain that followed it could be counted by individual drops. People are putting on a brave face, but realistically, it's frightening. Two towns -- Magdalena and Cloudcroft -- so far have run out of water when their wells ran dry, and they say that the reservoirs serving Santa Fe will dry up shortly. The Rio Grande is running nothing but sand and dust south of Elephant Butte. As bad as it is, there are still a surprising number of cattle out grazing on the next-to-nothing grasslands.

And yesterday, on the way up to Los Alamos, we saw pronghorn again grazing in their own fields.

The drive up was very scenic -- except for the smoke. Like last year and the year before, there are a number of large forest fires burning and when wind and weather conditions are just right, the whole region fills with smoke blocking views and making it difficult for people like me to breathe. I've been told I have mild emphysema from all those years I was a heavy smoker. These days, even fireplace smoke in the air will bother me. Forest fire smoke can get me into coughing fits.

Thankfully, that didn't happen.

When we climbed up the last few winding miles of cliff-clinging roadway to get into Los Alamos proper, I said it was something like the climb into Tahoe, and in fact, but for the absence of the Lake, the effect and the visuals are very similar.

Los Alamos and the labs are located on the ridges formed of volcanic tuff and lava flows by the Valles Caldera just to the west. For its part, the Valles Caldera is one of the largest and most recently active volcanic calderas in the country. It's said to have last erupted around 40,000 years ago, and it is still considered active. To see and realize just how extensive the volcanic formations around the caldera are -- mile after mile after mile, very thick, is to be reminded -- if a reminder was necessary -- just how impotent we puny humans are in the face of such enormous natural forces. The burned over Jemez Mountains just outside of town made clear what the presence of the volcanic formations might not have.

It seemed particularly appropriate to have that reminder in Los Alamos given what went on there and still goes on there.

This is a view of the Las Conchas Fire in 2011 taken from Placitas (the pic is from the WikiPedia). This fire burned into Los Alamos, threatening the labs and burning dozens of homes. It also destroyed important watershed, leaving the region highly vulnerable to flash flooding.

Most of the chatter among the the folks we were with in Los Alamos was about the drought and the increasingly harsh water restrictions people are living under and what can be done about it -- which isn't much. I'm still puzzled by the lack of cloud seeding in the area -- for there are clouds most days, and some are obvious rain clouds that drop nothing -- but there are unresolved issues with the process and much dispute over its environmental effects and effectiveness, so it's not being done to my knowledge at all. Part of the problem has been that the air is so dry, in many cases rain evaporates before it reaches the ground. Even seeded clouds would face the same atmospheric conditions.

So, in New Mexico, we suffer with drought and dust and wildfires while much of the rest of the country has way too much rainfall and massive tornadoes and other storms causing immense havoc. People are highly adaptable to changing weather conditions, but still...

Los Alamos is worth a return trip, not so much for touristy things (please) as for the diversity of insights we've found among people there. It really is a "thinking" place, and not all of the thinking is dedicated to blowing shit up with nuclear weapons -- as important as that seems to be among some members of the community. No, there are other things to think about. And many in Los Alamos do so.

-----------------------------------------
Meanwhile, having seen the show live all those many years ago, the movie of "The Rocky Horror Show" was a real let down when it came out. I know it's got cult status now, and we've been to a few of the audience participation presentations -- which at least re-energize it. Of course we never considered producing the stage version when we were in that line of endeavor... While "Rocky Horror" not quite as time-bound as "Hair", it's still something of a period piece... in a manner of speaking.

The Weather Outside...

 Weather satellite images courtesy of the Earth Science Office in Huntsville, Alabama.

When we bought this place in New Mexico seven years ago, a friend in California remarked, "Oh, so you'll have a place to escape when everything goes to shit, eh?" And I said, "Yeah, pretty much." We laughed, ruefully.

Here it is, December 1, and the high desert weather we're enjoying is essentially still Indian Summer. It can get cold overnight, sometimes into the teens, but daytime temps are in the 60s, quite balmy. The skies are pristine deep blue, hardly a cloud to be seen, the nighttime skies can take your breath away with their clarity and billions and billions  of brilliant stars. There's been just a tiny bit of rain, and a tinier bit of snow, since we've been here. There is little wind -- which is unusual, as this area tends to be windblown most of the time (thus the wind-farms down in Willard, for example). The only thing about it is that it is so dry, people are once again worrying about yet another drought.

Meanwhile in California, in the area we left, The Deluge appears to have come. We lived in an area that had been reclaimed from a seasonal lakebed, and our streets would flood from time to time. We were well aware that if the levees were overtopped (which seemed unlikely, but you never knew) our area would be under several feet of water, perhaps right up to our doorstep. Given the sea-level predictions we knew about in 2005, it seemed quite possible that large areas of the Central Valley (and of Sacramento in particular) would become part of an extended San Francisco Bay sometime in the not too distant future, and there would be little that could be (or more particularly, would be)  done about it.

We didn't count on the storms accelerating the process, however, though we were aware that the storms had been turning what was historically a rather dry area into quite a wet one over the course of the previous ten years or so.

I described what was happening to central California as if the region had been shoved some 700 miles northward into the rainforest. Though that was a bit of a stretch, it was remarkable how wet the Central Valley had become. One of the consequences was a very lush urban forest. So lush, in fact, that it had become dangerous to life and limb. What to do about it was a constant worry of public officials. Trees were being uprooted regularly in the many storms, trees and limbs were crashing down all over the place -- sometimes spontaneously, without the impetus of storms --  fire hazards were developing in the summertime, and people just weren't adapting quickly enough. It was impossible to keep up.

Those who lived through the recent climate changes in Central California were aware that the area had gone from quite dry to quite wet in a very short time, but the Official Story tended to claim the changes were only very slight, hardly perceptible, and that these Wet Periods were historically common, going back hundreds of years, so there was no certainty that there was some sort of connection with the realities of Global Climate Change. Officially, the area was still in "drought" for years after the rains came. And by some accounts, it's still in drought even though average rainfall has increased rather smartly.   I never knew whether this was Official Denial or something else, but it was strange...

Here in New Mexico, we're dealing with an opposite set of circumstances, seemingly perpetual drought, or rather, droughts that persist for longer than expected,  broken briefly (large amounts of snow or rain in a short period of time), then return to critically dry conditions that seem to last much longer than before.  The weather patterns are different, leading to overall dryer conditions which in some areas are much dryer. (I intend to post a description of just where we live one day, but not quite yet.)

Where we are is in an intersection of weather patterns. It's actually -- usually -- wetter here than on the west side of the mountains along the Rio Grande. There's at least the chance of more rainfall, but the weather comes in distinct narrow bands. It can be raining hard a few miles on either side of us, but be dry as dust right where we are. Same with snow. Or conditions can reverse: much rain and snow where we are, frightfully dry on either side. It seems that conditions overall are a good deal dryer now than seven years ago, but there was an even dryer period in the interim, so from a relative standpoint, the last few years have been somewhat "wet." It's as if this area had moved some hundreds of miles south into the Chihuahuan Desert of Mexico. It's not a dire situation (yet), but it's not particularly reassuring, either. So few people live in this region, however, that the human presence is not (yet) a huge stress on the land and such water as there is. People are aware that there was a lingering drought in the 1670's that caused the abandonment of the pueblos in the region, and it could happen again. We're not there yet, but it's wise to be on the alert.

In that context, the bloated size of Albuquerque is troublesome. It's New Mexico's one Big City, and from an environmental standpoint, it's way too big. Many times the size it "ought to be." It has only been able to grow as big as it is by extracting practically all the underground water and slurping up every drop it can from the Rio Grande. Realistically, it cannot grow any more, but it will try to anyway. It's the way of cities in the grip of real estate boomers and speculators. They are chock-a-block in ABQ -- and champing at the bit to make more money. The fact that Indian Pueblos border Albuquerque on the north and south and strictly limit the city's growth in those directions serves as a brake on rampant expansion and a reminder of how fragile the environment really is.

One thing that seems clear, though, is that the people in New Mexico are aware of their environmental limitations and they seem to be able to adapt reasonably well -- and reasonably quickly -- to changing conditions whereas people in California seem intent on fighting what's happening or refusing to adapt to changes.

The contrast can be striking sometimes.

We realize we have a lot of work to do on our own outlook before we can say we've adapted to conditions and changing conditions in New Mexico, and we'll make many mistakes along the way. We have a great deal to learn about the local/region environment and how best to live within it.